Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy de Gourmont
possibilities of his resurrection. The reason is that, leaving aside the paradoxical idea of Providence, we have since Gerbert scarcely changed our civilization.
When the Christians came into power, they preserved, outside those few spared by chance, only the books necessary for school instruction. There has survived of Antiquity precisely what would have survived of the seventeenth century, if the professors of the old University, together with the Jesuits and the Minims, had possessed the power of life and death over books. Adding La Fontaine to Boileau's catalogue, they would have burned the rest. The Christians burned much, in spite of their professions of love; and what they did not burn they expurgated. It is to them that we owe the almost burlesque image of a chaste Virgil. The authentic incompletion of the Æneid afforded a good pretext for cuts and erasures. The booksellers charged with the task were, moreover, unintelligent and lazy. But the great cause of the disappearance of almost all pagan literature was more general. A day came when it was deemed of no interest. From the first centuries its circle had already begun to dwindle. Could a Saint Cecilia find any pleasure in Gallus? This delicious, heroic Roman woman (who was found last century lying in the dust, in her bloody robes) changed her heart with her religion. Women ceased to read Gallus, and Gallus has almost completely perished.
In his interesting book on this subject,6 M. Stapfer has not taken into account changes in civilization. He has thought only of chance to explain the loss of so many ancient books. Chance is a mask, and it is precisely the duty of the historian to lift this mask, or to tear it. Between the sixth century and our own day, there has been one further partial modification in civilization – in the fifteenth century. About that time, the old literature began to lose its hold upon the public. The novels, the miracles, the tales seemed suddenly to have aged. They were no longer copied or recited. They were seldom printed, a single manuscript having preserved for us Aucassin et Nicolette, which is something like the Daphnis and Chloe of the Middle Ages. Accidents frighten the poet – and even the critic, who is colder, whose logic is more rigorous – the moment the suggestion is made of separating the purely historical idea of literary survival from the sentimental idea of justice. Till now – and I allude once more to the conservative rôle of modern civilization – the printing-press has protected writers against destruction; but the serious rôle of printing affects as yet only four centuries. This distant invention will appear some day as if contemporary at once with Rabelais and with Victor Hugo. When a time equal to that which separates us from the birth of Æschylus – two thousand three hundred and seventy-five years, let us say – shall have elapsed between us and a given moment of the future, what influence will printing have had on the preservation of books? Perhaps none. Everything not worth the trouble of reprinting – that is to say everything, with the exception of a few fortunate fragments – will have disappeared, and the more rapidly that the material substance of books has become more precarious. Even the discovery of a durable paper would not give absolute assurance of survival, because of the temptation to employ this excessively strong paper for a thousand other purposes. Thus the value of the parchment has often led to the sacrifice of a manuscript, just as gold articles go necessarily to the smelting-pot once the style has changed. The best material for the preservation of books would be something unchanging, but fragile, slightly brittle, so that it would be good for nothing outside its binding. Would not such a discovery be a curse?
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